Upping the Auntie: A 'Mame' Makeover

Christinen Baranski stars as the title role in "Mame" at the Kennedy Center through July 7.

It's a Friday afternoon, and Mame Dennis -- better known as Auntie Mame, or (full chorus now) just "Mame" on the musical stage -- is moving into the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater. Two grand pianos, sofas the length of Buicks, an erotic white sculpture, eye-popping drops: The dame totes in a lot of showy stuff.

The Kennedy Center's new $5 million production, with Christine Baranski in the title role, aims to give the old girl a new shine. (Performances began yesterday; the official opening is Thursday, and there is informed chatter that it could transfer to New York.) "Mame" was composer-lyricist Jerry Herman's rapid follow-up to "Hello, Dolly!" and it opened almost exactly 40 years ago in a "splendidly splashy production," according to the New York Times.

"If that was splashy," says director Eric Schaeffer as he watches designer Walt Spangler's set pieces being hauled into place, "then this is really, really splashy." Schaeffer, dressed in a long-sleeved black T-shirt and camouflage shorts, walks through the hubbub like a kid commando happily surveying the troops.

High style has always been fundamental to this "razzle dazzle butterfly," as Patrick Dennis described the character in his 1955 novel, "Auntie Mame" (subtitled "An Irreverent Escapade"). That book begat a hit play with Rosalind Russell, which begat a hit movie (Russell again). Then came the long-running musical -- more than 1,500 performances at the Winter Garden -- that made a big Broadway star of Angela Lansbury.

The 1974 movie of the musical was an unwatchable Lucille Ball bomb. So aside from a short-lived revival with Lansbury in 1983, "Mame" -- about a Depression-era bohemian whose young orphaned nephew is thrust into her unconventional lifestyle -- hasn't been heard from much since.

Not that this "Mame" will try to outdo the technically overloaded spectaculars that, along with jukebox musicals, have defined Broadway in recent years. Schaeffer and Baranski, speaking a day apart, eventually invoke the same phrase: "It is what it is." (Sounds like "I Am What I Am," the signature song from another long-running Herman hit, "La Cage Aux Folles.") So what seems to be on tap at the Kennedy Center is a 2006 edition of old-fashioned showbiz panache.

"It's a little slicker, a little hipper," suggests Schaeffer, longtime artistic director of the musically distinguished Signature Theatre in Arlington. "And streamlined."

In perhaps the most dramatic example of trimming, he describes changes made to "Open a New Window," a characteristically life-embracing anthem sung by Mame (and, eventually, the full chorus) in Act 1. Originally, Schaeffer says, the production number ran about eight minutes.

"Cut, cut, cut," he says now. "And Jerry was great about it. We're trying not to let the audience get ahead of the show."

"I'll gladly cut a whole song if it's holding up the action," says Herman, 74, delighted and aglow in his penthouse room at the Watergate Hotel. "I'm one of those unafraid to go to the chopping block. It's lost a little bit of unneeded fat around the edges of the fillet. I think it's just tighter, and actually better."

And more implicitly modern, offers Baranski -- still rooted in the character's 1920s and Herman's 1960s, but with an awareness of where we are now.

"I feel this 'Mame' has to have real sensuality and sexuality," she says, "and push certain aspects of her personality a little more."